Queensland Maritime Museum

South Brisbane

You don’t have to be a ship enthusiast to visit the Queensland Maritime Museum, which offers a fascinating insight into Queensland's seafaring history from its site on the Brisbane river.

Staffed by mostly ex-naval and maritime workers, between them they have a wealth of knowledge and are always delighted to explain the finer points of the exhibits.

The star attraction is the hulking great navy frigate Diamantina which was commissioned in 1945 and sits in the South Brisbane dry dock, which itself is a historic rarity. Once Brisbane’s riverbanks around the city area were littered with working wharves as the boat was the chief form of transport in the colonial days. This granite and Helidon sandstone dry dock was built between 1876 and 1881, when it opened.

Tours of the Diamantina itself are taken with a guide and are only suited to those who can negotiate cramped spaces and ladders. If time permits it’s worth taking, for an insight into both how the ship operates, the mock-up of the compromised living conditions of the ship’s crew during life at sea and to view signed Japanese surrender papers from the end of the war.

The museum itself has a fantastic collection of model boats and ships from throughout history and those associated with the discovery and history of Australia, a map pinpointing 200 of Queensland’s shipwrecks, the 1925 tug boat ‘Forceful’, cannons from the battle of Trafalgar and one of the smallest sailing boats ever to circumnavigate the world - the Happy II - sailed by owner Howard Wayne Smith as a replacement for ‘Happy’ which was wrecked on a Noumea reef.